Non-Competitive Egalitarian Societies

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Description

Cathryn Townsend:

"While the term (Egalitarianism) derives from the Enlightenment ideal of equality between people, in anthropology it refers to a tangible social practice rather than to a utopian ideal.

Egalitarian social organization and cultural practices are present to a high degree in most mobile hunter-gatherer societies and a few shifting cultivator societies, although there may be elements of egalitarianism, or egalitarian subcultures, in agricultural, pastoral, and industrial societies. Societies with the most extensive egalitarian practices are sometimes known as “noncompetitive egalitarian” societies or “assertively egalitarian” societies.

Noncompetitive egalitarian societies include, among others: the Hadza hunter-gatherers of East Africa; San hunter-gatherers of Southern Africa; Batwa, BaYaka, and Mbuti hunter-gatherers of Central Africa; Maniq hunter-gatherers of Thailand; Agta hunter-gatherers of the Philippines; Batek and Chewong hunter-gatherers of Malaysia; and Buid shifting cultivators of the Philippines."

(https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)


Characteristics

Cathryn Townsend:

"The social features that lead to classification as noncompetitive or assertively egalitarian include:

  • relatively equal social representation between different gender and age groups;
  • the absence of hierarchical relations and authoritative leaderships;
  • the absence of wealth accumulation; demand sharing of food and material goods;
  • the absence of particularistic social ties and dyadic relations of indebtedness;
  • mobility;
  • flexibility in living arrangements;
  • and avoidance as the preferred means of conflict resolution.


Not all these features are necessarily present in the same ways in different egalitarian societies but demand sharing is crucial to ensure that property-based inequalities and differential access to resources do not develop."

(https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)


Typology

Cathryn Townsend:

"Hunter-gatherer ethnographers interpret and articulate their observations of egalitarian practices in slightly different ways but there are striking commonalities between them.


James Woodburn (1982) categorizes human societies into two ideal types:

  • immediate-return societies (egalitarian, focused on the subsistence needs of the present) and
  • delayed-return societies (politically and economically differentiated, focused on

long-term investments of labor in order to acquire a material yield in the future).


Immediate-return societies have a system of procurement for immediate use without storage; equal relations in practice and ideology; direct access to resources, knowledge, and skills for all; ongoing freedom to choose one’s associates; and entitlement to share other people’s property.

Richard Lee describes a high level of sharing, low tolerance of personal accumulation, relatively equal gender relations, and a constant struggle against selfish, arrogant, and antisocial impulses among egalitarian hunter-gatherers.

Alan Barnard has used the term “foraging mode of thought” to describe an ethos found among hunter-gatherers, former hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, and urban beggars in which the social order is premised on sharing.

Finally, Polly Wiessner describes egalitarian social structures as resulting from complex cultural institutions and ideologies that empower a coalition of the weaker to keep the stronger in check.

Sometimes the term egalitarianism is applied misleadingly to social organization that involves extreme gender or age-seniority inequality, economic stratification, and authority figures. Tis has contributed to serious misunderstandings both within social and evolutionary anthropology and across those academic disciplines that have an interest in human evolution, such as archaeology, evolutionary biology, and evolutionary psychology. For example, it is widely assumed that violent male reproductive competition, gender inequality, and warfare are universal features of small-scale societies and characteristic of the evolutionary history of humans. A wider understanding of the characteristics that distinguish noncompetitive and highly mobile egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies from other less egalitarian small-scale societies could forestall some of these misunderstandings.

Delayed-return hunter-gatherer societies (such as those of Okiek and Inuit peoples), big men societies (such as those of Papua New Guinean horticulturalists), and non-stratified lineage systems (such as those of the Tallensi horticulturalists of West Africa and the Yanomami horticulturalists of Brazil and Venezuela) are all Acephalous Societies that are often misleadingly described as egalitarian because of their lack of enduring hierarchies and/or highly centralized leadership. However, a society that lacks a hierarchical leadership structure but does not conform to egalitarian principles in terms of its other features, such as relative gender equality, is better described as acephalous. Acephalous has the root meaning of headless and is thus better suited to describe social organization that is characterized only by the absence of top-down leadership or centralized power structures."

(https://www.academia.edu/29417676/Egalitarianism_the_evolution_of)